Twilight specifically got ripped on a lot because teenage girls liked it. So many people didn't bother to look into it any deeper than that and just assumed it was garbage because of it's audience.

I don't even like Twilight and I do think a lot of parts of it are problematic, but to dismiss it on the grounds of 'girls like it' is pretty bullshit.

That being said, it's still worth criticizing the problematic parts. I just wish it wasn't always the stuff 'made for women' that gets the most shit. (Which is why I smile every time Tat does an action hero comic.)

That's exactly the problem -- it's ALWAYS the "made for women" stuff that gets the criticism. There are all kinds of excuses apologists can make -- "at least porn doesn't present itself as literature" being a popular one. But at its core, why should those things matter? When some women indulge their fake-BDSM sexual fantasies in a way that makes it into the mainstream, both other women (because they think the relationship in the story is problematic) and men (because they're intimidated by women's sexual fantasies that don't involve them) find these fantasies objectionable.

I wish people could find it in themselves to either criticize problematic fantasies of men and women equally, or don't do it at all. To do anything else is not logically consistent.

"people", in the general sense you use, and logically consistent, don't go together._________________...if a single leaf holds the eye, it will be as if the remaining leaves were not there.http://about.me/omardrake

If a porno was to win an Oscar then the criticism would appear. People have no problem with the content of "underground" literature with questionable content. The problem began with the popularity._________________Welcome to Sinfest, the only place with a 46 pages long thread about sentient toasters

I totally agree that the fact that women's "cheesecake" or fantasy literature gets bashed irritates the crap out of me.

Heck, I defended Twilight, not because it's a good book, but because it's at least as good as many crappy for-men based stories that don't receive so much hate. Everyone made fun of Jacob taking his shirt off so much, I was like, "seriously?". How often do women strip with the same frequency and no one says jack.

I even understand things like 50 Shades of Grey comes have a strange place...What Darq said really struck me as pretty true.

Darqcyde wrote:

Couldn't most of what you're saying be a charge leveled against the romance genre as a whole? Is he the male counterpart of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl? Do we call him RHYC (Rich, handsome, young, caring)?

That for everything, those books appeal to the middle-aged crowd so much the same reason the Manic Pixie Dream Girl appeals to quiet brooding men that are afraid to be "vocal". Everyone sometimes feels in a rut and wants someone to come along and do something exciting.

But the reason books can have more "pornographic" themes than movies and not receive criticism is simple. It's the same thing I've commented OFTEN when people complain the movie was "toned down" with less graphic whatever (violence, sex, etc). When something is VISUAL, it's direct and raw. Heck, we ARE visual creatures and get a lot more data that way. You can describe something in a book extremely gross to try and get that visual image INTO a person. That same even shown visually with the same level of graphic attention to detail could turn the same person's stomach. The imagination has a limiting factor often enough.

So things like porn in literature don't come across as bad as if the stuff were live. I mean, my wife really loves the Immortals After Dark series, which I'll admit some have really decent stories, but if it were ever to be adapted, they would have to truly sensor some of the sex scenes, at least down to the point of good taste._________________